【誰にともなしに、独り言レス―その2961】
この警報は無視してオッケーなのは、もちろん無視してオッケーな（エラー回避して最優先タスク―月着陸オートパイロットを再起動・実行させる）ように周到にして綿密にプログラムされていたからで、その（アポロ11 をフリーズから救い、月着陸をアボートさせなかった）深謀遠慮ソフトを手掛けたマーガレット・ハミルトンの説明（MIT News July 17, 2009）―
Margaret Hamilton （was responsible for the Apollo On-Board Flight Software as director of the Software Engineering Division of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory）
I had lived through several missions before Apollo 11 and each was exciting in its own right, but this mission was special;we had never landed on the moon before. The media, most notably Walter Cronkite, was reporting everything in great detail. Once it was time for lift off,I focused on the software and how it was performing throughout each and every part of the mission. Everything was going according to plan until something totally unexpected happened, just as the astronauts were in the process of landing on the moon. Some things one never forgets, even after 40 years. I was standing in the SCAMA [Switching, Conference, And Monitoring Arrangement] room at Draper [the Instrumentation Lab, which later became Draper Laboratory] listening to the conversations between the astronauts and Mission Control when all of a sudden the normal mission sequences were interrupted by priority displays of 1201 and 1202 alarms, giving the astronauts a go/no go decision (to land or not to land). I looked across the room at Fred Martin and he back at me. What could possibly cause these alarms to be triggered at this most crucial time? It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it. With only minutes to spare, the decision was made to go for the landing. The rest is history.
